Samsung ‘Premium’ Blu-ray Player Does Ultra HD… Sort Of

LAS VEGAS — Now that Ultra High-Definition TVs — which have 4x the number of pixels as 1080p sets — are a real thing, the question remains: Does anything exist that can actually play the format? Samsung says yes, offering up a “premium” Blu-ray player capable of serving up Ultra HD video … with a catch.

The catch is the video is actually upconverted from 1080p (or standard-def), not native 4K (the other term for Ultra HD). You can’t really blame Samsung — since there isn’t yet a consumer disc format for Ultra HD, there wasn’t really a way to build a player that outputs 4K natively, at least not one that would be guaranteed to still work in a year.

The player (model no. BD-F7500) also includes built-in Wi-Fi, letting it play material wirelessly from any DLNA-connected device, or even connect with other Samsung smart appliances. What to check if your laundry’s done from your Blu-ray player? Now you can do that.

Power all this future goodness is a 900MHz dual-core chipset, which also helps power Samsung S-Recommendation engine, which the company says is “like a good friend who knows your interests,” recommending content from all the sources it can connect to.

Are you interested in a Ultra HD Blu-ray player that can only upconvert to the format? Let us know in the comments.

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